Flow and Flow Decay of Refractory Castables

摘要

Installation of refractory castables depend not only on flow, but also on how soon the flow is lost because of setting. The loss of flow (flow decay) has always been one of the main problems of refractory castable manufacturers, a problem that has not been too well described in literature. The flow decay has been studied for a castable system based on alumina, pointing out some general trends. The flow decay was found very temperature sensitive, being strongly accelerated by temperature increases. To compensate for excessive flow loss, a retarder like citric acid may be used. Thus flow decay was measured as a function of citric acid (retarder) addition at 35 deg C.